The Mystery of Doggerland - Atlantis in the North Sea - Graham Phillips - Origins Conference 2023

Okay, right, I want to introduce you to our next speaker. This is Mr Graham Phillips, the author of a very large number of books that challenge the way we look at the past on various topics from Robin Hood to King Arthur to Merlin to Mary Magdalene, through to megalithic structures, Stonehenge, and what he'll be talking about next, which is the Lost Land of Doggerland, which he will introduce. But I just want to also point out that Graham is my oldest friend. We've known each other since 1978, when he turned up mysteriously in my life when I was actually investigating a strange UFO encounter in Essex, and a lot of weird stuff was going on, and we realised that we needed a parapsychologist to help us out. And the lady of the house, Sue Day, actually had this dream of somebody who would come along and would help us with the initials GP, and we thought that it was going to be a general practitioner, you know, a doctor would turn up. Two weeks later, Graham Phillips turned up in our life, parapsychologist investigating paranormal for the Society of Psychical Research, and the rest, as we say, is history. So without further ado, Mr Graham Phillips. Doggerland used to be an area of dry land that connected Britain to continental Europe during the Ice Age, when sea levels were a lot lower. Then gradually, over the years after the Ice Age, as the temperature warmed up, the sea levels rose, and Doggerland submerged, leaving it as a number of broken-up islands, until eventually it was gone altogether. And in my book, I examine the possibility that one of the islands of Doggerland actually developed an early civilisation, that when the place eventually sank beneath the waves, the population moved to what is now Britain and the British Isles, and established what became the megalithic culture, who went on to build Stonehenge. Now, okay, let's start at the beginning. When the first Romans and Greeks arrived in Britain, between 2000-2500 years ago, they heard tales from the Celtic people of the British Isles that there used to be a civilisation that sank beneath the waves somewhere off the coast of Britain, and the inhabitants came to and they were the ones who built the stone circles that were here before they were. The Celts came to Britain from around about 3,000 years ago, but we now know that places like Stonehenge and other stone circles go back to 5,000 years, so they're talking about predecessor culture, and we'll call it the megalithic culture, or megalithic civilisation, for want of a better word. And the Celts seem to have, well, they knew there was people who were here before them, but in their myths and legends they were talking about the fact that this was founded by people who came from a sinking land off the coast of Britain. Now, a lot of the people who wrote down these stories were Irish monks in the 5th century, in Ireland particularly, and these Christian monks, did I say Irish monks particularly in Ireland? Yeah, they would be, wouldn't they? Anyway, these Irish monks, particularly in Ireland, talk about the fact that this island, they give it many names, Thule is one of them, some people called it Thule. I don't like that name, Thule is the name I use in the book, because the word Thule is, the Nazis began to adopt the idea of this great civilisation of Nordic people that used to live somewhere off Britain, and it was called Thule. Well, the actual name the Celts used was Thule, and it was nothing like some kind of Nazi super race. These people were basically considered to be holy, well, like Debbie was talking about earlier, shade persons. Now, there are the later legends of fairy folk and things came from that, but when we look at what the earliest Greeks and Romans say that the Celtic people of Britain claimed, they claimed that this island was off the east coast of Britain, or the northeast coast, somewhere either in the north or the east, it would have been. Now, there's not hardly any islands there at all now, all the islands in the British Isles tend to be on the west coast, but at the east coast, after the Ice Age, and for many millennia after, as the sea levels gradually rose, there these various islands sank, but there were a number of islands there that had once all been highland of the area of Doggerland, which connected Britain to continental Europe. So, right, is it possible that these Celtic people were right, that the people from one of the islands of Doggerland did become advanced, they came to Britain, and they brought with them the idea and the skills to build all these stone circles? Well, first of all, let us just get an idea about what the megalithic civilization really is. I mean, I know most of you are all completely aware of many aspects of the megalithic civilization, but let's just have a look at a few and just remind ourselves. Okay, here we go, let's see, does that work? Yeah, we'll go. Anybody know what that is? Well, most of you probably haven't heard of it, it's miles from here, it's called Aythbury. Oh, is it? Oh, apparently Andy's giving a tour around there tomorrow, and Hugh is, and they're accompanied by some famous people, I don't know who those famous people are, but that's what it says, special guests. Unfortunately, it won't be me on account of the fact. So there we've got a ring around half a village where Andrew Bryan Collins used to live in Aythbury. That is some massive stone circle. When I talk to Americans about this and say that Stonehenge is like about a hundred foot, it's about a hundred foot in diameter, whereas Aythbury is a thousand feet and surrounded by this massive great ditch and embankment, which was probably now about 30 feet deep and 30 feet high. It would have been much, much, much higher one, two, three, four and a half thousand years ago when it was built, and was originally considered to be around it about a hundred outer stones weighing up to 40 tons, some of these things, which is heavier than anything at Stonehenge, with inner circles as well. Now, okay, that is the biggest in, I'm doing it again, aren't I? That is the biggest in the British Isles. That's the biggest stone circle in the British Isles, but it is only one of these super large stone circles surrounded by ditches and embankments that were built by the megalithic people, and they themselves were just part of what are known as megalithic complexes, whole arrangements of megalithic monuments and monoliths and earthworks that tended to be similar throughout the whole of the British Isles. Go on to the next one and we see, here's another one, the stones from this one have actually been taken away by the church years ago in the Middle Ages to build a church that's in the centre of it, but you can again see around the outside we have a ditch and embankment. Now, what's weird about these ditches and embankments around these stone circles, and you can get some idea about how big these would have been, the weird thing about it is that the ditch is on the outside of the embankment, sorry, no, on the inside of the embankment, which is the opposite way round of what you would need it for defensive purposes. The idea of a ditch is to have a moat in it or to make it higher for people to then climb up the embankment on the inside, which is then fortified above with people hurling things at you. That's the idea of defensive fortifications, but if you've got the moat on the inside of the embankment, that's pointless for defensive purposes, and all we know about these people is that they did live very peaceable lives, because there's no evidence that they fortified their dwellings and their tombs and their graves bear absolutely no evidence of people killed in battle, like broken skulls and broken arms, and they didn't seem to make any weapons for any reason other than for hunting. So these were peaceable people, but they obviously had some deep beliefs in something. Whatever the reason for them building the ditch on the inside of the embankment, whatever it is, it's not defensive. It's obviously some mystical purpose or some spiritual purpose, religious, sort of scientific, who knows what it is, but it's not defensive. Now the interesting thing is that these ditches and embankments are collectively known as henge monuments. Stonehenge has got one around it, but it's quite worn away over the years, and that's why Stonehenge gets its name. When people say, oh there's a henge near us, and they're just talking about a little stone circle, because the smaller stone circles didn't tend to have these, they're not talking, a henge monument isn't the circle itself, it's the ditch and embankment around it, and here you've got something where only a henge remains standing, that is at Arbor Low, which is in Derbyshire. Again it seems that some people think that those stones were all originally put there flat, well it doesn't seem so, it seems that they were knocked down deliberately, whereas the people at that other stone circle, which is in Dorset I showed you, what they did was to use these stones to build the church. The church in this particular area knocked them all flat, presumably in the belief that what that would do is to stop the devil's power or whatever was inside it, and incidentally at Avebury, all the stones there were at one point flattened down by a bunch of Puritans and somebody, now I think it was actually during the medieval period, but somebody eventually managed to sort of, you know, put them all back up again, or most of the ones that still survived. A lot of them were broken up and used to create the local village there, where Andy Collins lived, shame upon him. So we'll go on, so I'm just going to give you some idea about sort of what these megalithic complexes are like, so, and you've got many, there are evidence of dozens of them that still survive throughout the British Isles, that's in addition to over, well over a thousand smaller stone circles and other solitary standing stones, but just look, same with the idea of the megalithic complexes for the moment, they tended to have the same general kind of appearance. Okay, here in this picture what you see is avenues of stones, this is at Avebury, and the avenue of stones there leads away from the monument for a couple of miles before ending up in the middle of a field with another arrangement of monuments of stones which are called the Cove. Also right near the stone, there was a second avenue which led to a smaller stone circle a mile or two away, and in between the two, like between the horns almost as it were, you had this, which is an artificial hill, that's the largest one in Europe, and it's about 300 feet high now, God knows how high it would have been back in the megalithic times, four and a half thousand years ago when the thing was created, but it would seem to be all part of a group of monuments that were in the same area, this is why it's called a complex, and these artificial hills, what's weird about them is when they've been dug into, at first they were thought to be tombs, obviously, but they're not, ground penetrating radar, archaeological digs both into and under these monuments have shown that there's no evidence of chambers or burials or anything like that within them, they were just artificial hills. If you ever go to, which you may do tomorrow, if you may wander over to Silbury Hill, you'll get there and you'll think, hold on a minute, there's real hills around here, if they needed some high up place to sort of observe the landscape or watch the stars or whatever else they wanted to do, they already had perfect and higher hills, natural hills around, so what was the purpose of this thing? Just like the backwards ditch and embankment, the henge monument around the big stone circle, these hills are a mystery, and they're all over the place, there's another one there in the Midlands of England, not so well known, the stone circle that stood nearby, there's only about two stones of it remain, but again it would have been a similar situation, there's another one, here's how the Avery stone circle and those monuments I've been talking about all come together, you've got the stone circle itself with its henge around it, you've got the scale there showing half a mile, so you can see this is pretty big, we've got one avenue of stones leading all the way to the sanctuary, which is a small stone circle, and another avenue of stones leading to a cove, or an arrangement of three stones I think is in that case, and then Silbury Hill between them. Now okay, so that's basically what a megalithic complex was, and there were dozens of these around the country, and I suppose you'd say if you've got a tribal area, or an area of affiliated people, somewhere within that tribal area, we'll call it that, you've got the main focal point, which is this megalithic complex consisting of these kind of monuments, but that was not all, and there could have been as many as 50 or 100 throughout the British Isles, these things were huge, and there were many, most of them now would be underneath what is now cities, and so there's no, or been completely farmed away over the centuries, so there's no evidence of them, but there's still quite a few that can be seen around the countryside. Stonehenge is one of them, but Stonehenge is a bit different, because Stonehenge is the only one in the country to have those lintels across the top to form the arches. Every time you see Hollywood films portraying stone circles in Britain, they've all got those arches like Stonehenge, no, only Stonehenge has them. There are things that have lintel stones or a stone across the top with a couple or three or more stones underneath it, but they were old tombs known as dolmens, and they're something completely different and much smaller. Okay, now you've got the central megalithic complex, and then between those you have got avenues of stones, not avenues of stones, alignments of stones, sometimes a few hundred feet apart like these ones known as the Devil's Arrows in Yorkshire, just a few, there's another one in there somewhere, there's three of those quite close together, but these alignments of stones sometimes go for miles across the countryside to lead to another stone circle, sometimes a big one, sometimes a small one. I'm not talking about ley lines here, that's something different, I won't get into that, but even archaeologists accept that these alignments of stones sometimes placed a few miles apart, solitary monoliths, are placed in some kind of way so that they are joining in pretty much a straight line to sites. The archaeologists won't accept that they were directing energy or anything like that, but they certainly do accept that in many cases these were deliberate alignments of solitary monoliths. Sometimes you just get monoliths standing on their own, like this one here, there's Debbie, dwarfed, well she's dwarfed anyway, I think she's five foot one or six, what are you, five foot half? Anyway, sorry, I'll try and find someone else to insult later on, sorry that guy at the back doesn't come from Pusey. Okay, so there's, you can see what the size of some of these things are, that is actually the biggest one in the British Isles that still stands in Yorkshire called the Ruddston Monolith, it's in the churchyard, the reason it's in the churchyard is because the local people, when first converted to Christianity, didn't want to abandon their own gods straight away, so what the Christians did is to say, look we'll put our church here so we can have our Jesus being worshipped, or our saints, and at the same time you can keep your stone, you can do, yeah that sounds like a good idea, so you are very often got these things built right next to each other, and sometimes they both survive, which I find interesting, but anyway, you probably find quite difficult knocking that thing down. Okay, so you've got these solitary monoliths as well, then you've got the smaller stone circles that a lot of people are familiar with, they've got slight variations, local anomalies, for example up in Scotland, you actually end up with these called the recumbent stone circles, as they're called, a stone circle with a flat lying stone between a couple of the monoliths, the reason for it, there's many theories, Alexander Thom, I don't know how you pronounce his name, he basically said that he thought that they were to do with moon, the moon would seem to roll across it at certain nights of the year, a full moon, and it had something to do with that, who knows, but that is a variation of the stone circle that you tend to get in Scotland, much more the normal variety is just a number of stones in a circle, I think you get them in Cornwall, you get them pretty much everywhere, you don't get them in cities because they've long ago disappeared, you tend not to get them in the east of England because it seems that they preferred higher ground, and higher ground seems to be more in the west than the north, here's another one, this one's in Derbyshire, and there are well over a thousand of these smaller stone circles that consisted of stones just a couple of feet high, up to 15, even 20 feet high some of them, and from say 12, hello, from say 12 or 15 in a circle, up to sometimes 100 if there were smaller ones, so they didn't actually all tie up with the exact same type and number and shape and everything else, but they were all these circles all over the country, nobody knows why they built all these stone circles of various types, because there was no form of writing at the time, we're going back, we'll put the beginning of the sort of megalithic age at about 5,000 years ago and the Celts turn up 2,000 years later, there wasn't writing in Britain until only 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years after the megalithic civilisation started, and that was when the Greeks and Romans came in, it wasn't until the Romans invaded Britain in the first century AD that anything was written down about what was believed, and the Celtic people who'd been here for a thousand years, who presumably heard it from their predecessors, had various theories about these stone circles, but they don't tell us an awful lot, apart from the fact that the people who built them were supposed to have come from an island that seems to have lay in the eastern or northeastern seas around the British Isles. Okay, here's another thing that's in common with a lot of these stone circles, large ones and small ones, what's known as a king stone or sometimes a queen stone, that is a stone that's placed outside the main circle and is usually in line with the summer solstice, either sunrise or sunset, or the winter solstice, sunrise or sunset, and they're fairly common throughout the country, and that's a very small one, that stone there is only about two feet high, this one here, that's the heel stone from Stonehenge and I don't think there'll be anybody sitting in this room who didn't know that on mid-summer, at sunrise, the sun seems to come, as seen from the centre of the circle, right over the heel stone. Okay, now we move on to where did this civilisation come from? How did it get here? How did it get here? Well, I'll tell you, well I won't tell you, I will tell you how it didn't get here. The general theory is that it came from northern France, from Brittany, northwest France, and it came over to Britain, to the south first, where Stonehenge and Avebury are, and it eventually moved northwards, ending up in the top of Scotland, over a century or so. Well, that seemed to make sense, there are all these megalithic stones in Brittany, there's massive stone rows like at Carnac, which are extremely famous, there are many old burial mounds and standing stones, galore, and stone, various earthen mounds with stones on them, and yeah, they had a kind of megalithic civilisation, and some people call it a megalithic civilisation, but it is nothing like the megalithic stone circle builders of the British Isles. They did not have these great big round stone circles, with henge monuments around them, and these great big artificial hills, they had some, but not an association with these stone circles, and stone avenues coming from stone circles, that didn't exist there. You have to see the whole thing, its entirety, it's not like, well, the Stonehenge, and that looks like this, and the people from northern France built stone monuments just before that time. Yes, they did, but when you look at the whole situation in the British Isles, and these massive megalithic complexes, which are the same from the top, from the north, to the south, from Ireland, through across to the east of England, they're all pretty much the same kind of monuments, not exactly the same shapes, but you know, local variations, but they're all the same kind of thing, and they're interspersed with smaller stone circles, with alignments of stone monoliths in between them, and they had nothing like that in France. Whatever happened, the megalithic civilisation does not have a theatre come from France, but there's nothing else in Europe that's even remotely like it. Yes, there's megalithic builders, yes, there's people building huge great earthworks, but there's nothing like there is here, in what I've been referring to as the megalithic civilisation of Britain. Okay, or sorry, the British Isles, because Ireland was just as much affected as Scotland, England and Wales. So, okay, but it's only really since the dawn of scientific dating techniques, such as carbon dating, but incidentally some people might be asking, how do you carbon date a stone? Can't you only just carbon date something that was once living organic matter? Well, that is true, something that was bone or wood or something like that. Yes, you can date that, but a stone, no. Well, you basically date what's underneath it. The stone was plonked in, if you can dig down underneath it, if you can find fragments of bone that have been used by the cutting devices to dig the hole in that, you can date those fragments of bone, or fragments of vegetation or anything else that's down there. That's how they date stone circles. Okay, since such modern dating techniques came in, they basically started to say, where are the oldest stone circles? They were expecting to find them somewhere down by Stonehenge. No, they didn't find them there, they found them right at the top of the country in the Orkney Isles and northern Scotland, and then they began to move south over a hundred years or so, moving then into Ireland, Wales, England, and in fact Stonehenge and Avery are pretty much last on the list, and they're being built about 500 years after the whole thing started, around about 3000 BC it started, and Stonehenge and Avery were not really started to be put together in their present form until about 500 years later. So everybody thought, wow, so it started in the north. Okay, so if it starts in the Orkney Isles, based on dating, okay, that's where the oldest stone circles are. Where could it have come from? Well, across the sea from Scandinavia, nothing like it there. Oh, Iceland? Doubt it. The North Pole? There's only Klaus up there, and he goes on the carve-up every Christmas. Sorry, the sleigh. Anyway, that's about him. We hate him, don't we? Well, I do. Anyway, he never brings me anything. Have you noticed that anybody who really wants something, he doesn't bring it to them, they all believe in him. Oh, and it's strange, his name is an anagram of Satan, and he wears red like the devil. I mean, I could go on, blood on Santa's claw. Anyway, less of this, I'll put you off him now. Okay, that looks very similar to Avery, doesn't it? That is the first megalithic complex that was built anywhere in the country on the Orkney Isles. It's known as the Ring of Brodgar. The dating is really strange because they're getting different datings coming from different things, but it probably comes from original contamination. But that seems to be almost 3,000 years old, much older than the stone circle at Avery. Anyway, it was originally thought to be a contemporary of Avery, but the fact of the matter is, it's pretty much the same. It hasn't got 100 stones, it's smaller, but it's the third biggest stone circle in the British Isles, first one being Avery, second one being Stanton Drew, which is in Somerset, the third one being this one. And this had about 60 stones around it, and they're about 12, some of them are even higher, feet high, and they're in a ring, and you've got the henge, the embankment and ditch around it that are built backwards for defensive purposes. I mean, it's astonishing that in a country that didn't have any form of communications networks, that had no overall kind of monarchy or anything like ancient Egypt, that had no controlling armies or police forces, should all basically stick to the same thing all over the place. Yeah, you can understand cultures all being Christians, or all following the Roman gods or whatever else, if you've got somebody in charge, but these were completely separate tribal units all over the place, yet for some reason they carried on building these stone circles in the same way all over the place, from the top of the British Isles right the way down to where Stonehenge is in the south coast, for centuries. Now, it must have had some particularly important purpose to them, and it may have been religious, but I've argued in a previous book to this, and I won't go on about that now because I haven't got the time, but if you look up, if you go onto my website and look up my book, Wisdom Keepers of Stonehenge, you will see some of my theories about what they were using these stone circles for, but whatever it is, I could be wrong, they are certainly really mysterious. Now, these here that I'm showing you now, that is the oldest dated stone circle so far discovered in the British Isles, that is known as the Stones of Stenness, it's part of what's known as the East Lock of Stenness complex, which includes, at its heart, as we know, like Avebury was at the centre of the complex of Avebury, the Ring of Brodgar I showed you in the previous slide, that's at the centre, you would have once had a couple of avenues of stones moving away from it, one of them going a mile or two across what they call an isthmus I think, a kind of strip of land connecting a couple of locks, dividing a couple of locks, and that then went to, one of them went to this stone circle, which is the oldest in the world, the Stones of Stenness, and they're about 15 feet high each, there was about 12 of them to start off within a ring that's about 50 feet across, and I think five of the stones now remain, but it's been dated as 3100 BC, so that's over 5,000 years old, that's 600 years before the Stonehenge that we now see was built, there was an earlier stone circle there, a simpler one, but that's another story, it's 600 years before Avebury, I mean this is where it's all starting, but this was part of the, I'll just call it the Stenness complex, which is Brodgar this, and a number of others, there's an artificial hill nearby, it's far more worn away than Silbury, but it's there, and you've got other outlying stones, and there would have been other stones earlier on across the moorlands, connecting to smaller stone circles, which are known about through geophysics surveys and ground sensing radar. Okay, so where is this? Ring of Brodgar, Stones of Stenness, connected by that strip of land that goes across the lock, now the locks are worn, and the strip of land doesn't go right across, so they've had to build a kind of bridge, and there's a road goes across it now, so it's back to being a strip of land, so that was where the megalithic complex was. When these people arrived in the Orkney Islands, and they started building these structures, they also started building new type of tombs, there'd been tombs before called long barrows, which had sort of small underground chambers, some people know places like Wayland Smithy, but what started to happen when the megalithic culture first appeared on the Orkney Isles, they started having these round burial mounds, and inside were really elaborate chambers, and around them they also built ditches and embankments like they did around stone circles, and this one, Maeshowe Tomb on the Orkney Isles, which is very close to the Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness, that was one of the first ones, if not the first one built on the British Isles, and inside, that's inside, there were far more elaborate structures, and look at it, that is really well built for a people who had previously basically been living in mud huts. I mean, suddenly they were able to put some stones together to make chambers in small burial sites, but they suddenly were able to do this. Now, those were then copied all around the country, they started appearing in North Wales, they soon after appeared in Ireland, where you've got absolutely massive and amazing looking ones. Some people will tell you, well, doesn't the tomb, the megalithic tomb at Newgrange in Ireland, where that comes from, that was stolen from there, apparently they were looking for the person who stole it, some people will say, oh well that goes back four or five thousand years, because they found alignments of this. Yeah, there were stones around there four or five thousand years ago, earlier than they think, the actual place itself was built, but the Newgrange burial mound, or whatever it was used for, came later than the ones in Scotland, although not much later. Okay, now we move on to how these people lived. After living in what were basically mud huts, for want of a better word, I know Debbie won't like that expression, because that's like calling ancient people savages, but they lived in mud huts, Debbie. They started suddenly living in these things here, which were really quite elaborate, they were a series of underground dwellings that were connected together by underground tunnels and thatched over basically, or covered with roofs with turf over them, so that they were warm underground in the winter and shaded from the sun in the summer, and this particular village is called Skara Brae, and it's so well preserved because it was covered in sand by a freak storm thousands years ago, but that village is about five thousand years old, look they've still got the cupboards in there, the closets that they use for stuff, and that thing on the right hand side is what would have been a bed when they put a load of straw in it, or seaweed, dried seaweed, and then blankets over the top in order to sleep. I mean they even had quite a sophisticated plumbing and sewage system, well they were better, they lived better then than they did in the middle ages, and this suddenly, again note the mill building techniques, after having none previously, now it's not only the building techniques that these people suddenly had on the Orkney Isles, they had firing techniques, people had had pottery before, but the kind of pottery that was able to be made in the kind of kilns that these first people, first megalithic people on the Orkneys had, could get much higher temperatures, over a thousand degrees centigrade, they were able, they could almost, if they wanted to, although they didn't, have smelted iron, but what they were able to do is to fire pottery, much higher than it had been before fired, and make it much stronger, therefore you could make much more elaborate designs, and what they could also do, and they were doing this literally a millennium before many people, they were able to start making the very first bronze weapons, or bronze, it wasn't that sophisticated, bronze is an alloy of copper and zinc, and is that copper and tin, copper and tin, copper and tin, bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, and there had been bronze made in a few isolated places in the world, but these people started actually making tools out of it, way before anybody else did it, way before, the actual bronze age in this country doesn't start until about 500 years after these people were making these tools when they first arrived in the Orkneys, then they seemed to forget how to do it for 500 years, until a new lot of people came over from the continent known as the Beaker people, that's another story, they were also able to make quite sophisticated jewellery and trinkets out of gold and silver, and they were able to manipulate soft metals, nothing like this had happened until these people suddenly came and arrived seemingly from nowhere and started building stuff on the Orkney Isles. Their pottery, what's fascinating about it, apart from the fact that it's different to anywhere else and more sophisticated than anything that had come before, when scientists have examined the remains inside these pots, what they found is the remains of substances that could only have been used for curative purposes, from natural extracts from various parts of plants, and in some cases from animals, and these particular substances were able to relieve pain, way before proper analgesics were invented, they were able to induce sleep, comas almost, where they could perform amputations, and yes they have found bodies of people who've had surgical amputations where they've been cut through and lived afterwards. How do we know they weren't chopped off in battle? Well you don't sort of do that in the middle of a battle, do you, if you don't want to get killed? So they suddenly had all these horrible medicines that were coming from nowhere. So okay, you've got this culture that suddenly appears on the Orkney Isles and suddenly starts building these kind of stone circles and megalithic complexes with everything that they involved, from scratch, when nothing like that had happened before, they're able to, they've got a form of, they're able to make kilns which are much more sophisticated than what came before, they suddenly have this knowledge of medicine that's to a much higher degree than any archaeology has found before that time, and so on, you've got all these building techniques that are suddenly far more advanced, you've got a new way of doing things, a way of planning and constructing stone circles and building these elaborate sewage systems that they had in their villages. Now this suddenly appears from nowhere, there is evidence of the people who came back before that in the Orkney Isles, but there's nothing to tell us where this lot came from, they suddenly appeared out of nowhere, I mean it was just suddenly there, now there's been, you know, it didn't come up from the south, it couldn't have come, there's no evidence it came across from anywhere in continental Europe, from Scandinavia or the north, it certainly didn't come across from America, there's just nowhere where it seemed to could have come from that's been discovered so far. So when we hear and remember the myths and legends of the Celtic people a couple of thousand years ago that said there was once an island off the coast of Britain to the east of Britain and they came from there, you start to think well it couldn't have just, somebody just couldn't have invented it fully intact, it had to have developed, they had to have developed how to use these medicinal herbs, they had to experiment trial and error with these building techniques, it would have taken years to do all this, so that taking years must have taken place somewhere else and what are these, this island theory of the ancient Celts is beginning to be the only thing that makes any kind of sense. Now okay, is there evidence that there was some kind of culture on one of the last islands of Doggerland as the seas began to rise or continued to rise? Well firstly there in the Bay of Firth what happened going back to 2011 is that a sonar and geophysics and radar scan of the bed of the bay suddenly discovered an anomaly, there was something that was pretty much perfectly circular and it was a round embankment that seemed to also include parts of a ditch that also seemed to have been fallen stones inside it, it looked for all the world like a stone circle at the bottom of the sea and the depth it was down of 12 feet incidentally showed that they knew that the time that it has taken for the sea to rise since that was on dry land was around about a thousand years. Now the sea then reached its current level around 3000 BC, so a thousand years before that is going back to around 4000 BC and what did they have? They had a stone circle seemingly on the seabed that must have been dry land 4000 BC, a thousand years before the first stone circles were built in Britain, it took eight years to get the funding to act for these guys to actually go diving there and when they did they were absolutely shocked because what they found in a nutshell, and it has to be in a nutshell now because we're running out of nuts, basically, if that makes any sense, basically what they found was an almost identical copy of the Stenness megalithic complex, a circle of the same size and proportions as the Ring of Brodgar, smaller satellite circles around it, they found even an artificial hill of same proportions as the one that was near to the Ring of Brodgar and they also found around the Ring what appeared to be exactly the same proportions as the Henge monument, the ditch and embankment that surrounded the Ring of Brodgar, so consequently on the bottom of the sea they had an exact same megalithic complex that eventually ends up on dry land or is copied on dry land but a thousand years earlier. Now was that just one freak bit? Had they started the megalithic culture on the Orkney Isles before it sort of stalled for a while and it wasn't for quite some time before they restarted it, you know, that doesn't prove it came from an island that was much further to the east, I mean that's right on the shores of the Orkneys but that wasn't the first, that wasn't the first, oh well that's really weird, I had a lot more to say but because I am now running out of time I'm not going to be able to say so buy the book, but what I'm saying is what's known now and this is what's going to really start to sort of get people to start waking up a bit and thinking wow that's amazing because people now are just saying that it just obviously started a little bit earlier in the Orkneys than we think. Further to the east they now know, and this is who are they, we're talking about scientists and geologists, now know that the last part of Doggerland to actually sink beneath the waves was there, what we call North Doggerland or a lot of archaeologists tend to call it Fairland which sounds a lot better I think because of the modern fair isle which is the only part of it still remains above the water which is a tip at the top which is an island now, remote island in the North Sea, but North Doggerland there, the reason, everybody before thought the rest, that part of Doggerland had sank much earlier but the reason why they didn't know until relatively recently is they'd overlooked something called seismic readjustment, basically what that means is not only were the seas rising but that part of Scotland was rising, how? Because during the ice age there was two miles of ice pressing down on it and when it went gradually slowly but surely as the seas rose so did that part of Scotland and now they know this and this is only recent studies, they now know that there's an area there that was above sea level till at least 3500 BC and that is just before the main megalithic building starts on Orkneys itself and it is just after that particular stone circle started to sink that they found in the Bay of Firth, so you know they've got a place there to start looking, archaeologists that have searched Fairland which is the only part of Doggerland still to survive have found some pretty remarkable things, you won't find the results, the residue of a civilisation there because that was a piece of highland that existed, remote highland, not very welcoming at the very north of what their land would have been but what have they found there? Rather simple dwellings but two almost perfectly preserved saunas, I won't bother going into explaining why they know there were saunas but they do because of the way they were designed and coals that were found there and so forth, at least a thousand years before the Finns were supposed to have invented it and before the megalithic civilisation ended up on the Orkney Isles they found evidence of vitrifying rock, that is melting great big pieces of rock together with fire of incredible heat in order to make walls to stop the rising seas and in an attempt to anyway, you've got stuff like this that's been found there from at least 4000 BC, you know towards the end of when the rest of Doggerland was sinking and apart from that the latest surveys of what's now thought to be North Doggerland and they're keeping it pretty secret, they're keeping you know what they may have found down there because they don't want divers going out and basically robbing these places for as treasure seekers but they are beginning to find evidence of more stone circles and ones that are even as big as Avebury and I'll leave you on that good day.